The one and only mistake you can
make when watching Inherent Vice is
to attach any sort of significance to the contours of the plot, because the
movie certainly doesn’t, although the characters certainly do in their more
sober moments, and trying to hold the many threads and conspiracies and
betrayals in place is a dangerously slippery proposition. Like trying to hold several bars of lathery
slope while running alongside the pool.
Nominally, the movie is about Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) trying to
help his ex-girl (Katherine Waterston) prevent a scheme by the wife of her
current boyfriend, a famous real estate mogul named Mickey Wolfmann, to have
Wolfmann tossed into a looney bin so she can get her hands on his money. But even that initial setup is only recalled
occasionally at first, and is dismissed halfway through when….well, that would
be spoiling, and that’s not Doc’s way.

There are sideplots and sidetracks
aplenty, including a search for a possibly dead, or maybe not, musician named
Coy (Owen Wilson), a drug heist, and a run-in with a pair of gang thugs (Peter
McRobbie and Keith Jardine). Every step
of the way, Doc is alternately helped and antagonized by his contact in the
LAPD, officer Bjornsen, aka “Bigfoot” (a perfect-as-always Josh Brolin). Like I said though, the side details are
irrelevant. This is a film about
watching people be their strange, altered-state-of-mind selves in the
post-hippy setting of the 1970’s, and is merely content to flit from scenario
to scenario, all of it observed through Doc’s unfazed, and often unfocused
eyes.

Is the movie about something? It could be, although like with any film by
Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s hard to say, and one can never escape the feeling
that even to ask such a question is to get something fundamentally wrong. For all its setup as a grimy thriller, the
movie just never seems to care all that much about itself. Just consider Doc’s notebook- he scribbles
into it furiously whenever he picks up on a possible lead or gets a piece of
valuable information, but on the few times we see what he actually does write,
it’s either gibberish, or a nonsensical code that only translates to something
inside his own fevered mind. When told a
Spanish saying offering a clue as to the whereabouts of the Wolfmann, he merely
writes, “Something Spanish.”

Joaquin Phoenix has spent the past
few years coming back in style after his absence from the film world, giving us
one compulsively watchable performance after another in The Master, The Immigrant,
and Her, but it might be this
performance of his that offers the biggest clues as to what makes him such a great
actor for these sorts of strange, oddball roles- his face can be so inscrutable
at times, but in the small spaces between lines he can shift expression in ways
both large and small that can perfectly carry the emotion of a scene. Doc often repeats himself, so the meaning
behind the words comes more often than not from whatever expression Phoenix is
holding on his face during the scene, and it’s fantastic to watch.

While everyone on-screen is a blast,
the other brightest light is Josh Brolin’s Bigfoot, a hulking, grunting,
scowling, mountain of everything people then and now would associate with the
powers that be. He openly derides
anything smacking of hippy culture, doing his darnedest to be a true Man’s Man,
while also consuming reams of popsicles and chocolate-covered bananas in a
manner that any frequenter of porn sites would be most familiar with. He and Doc are perfect foils for each other,
and at a deep, unspoken level, they seem to know that, and they look out for
each other even when one is trying to screw over the other. A final scene between the two of them is
perhaps the one part of the entire film that breaks through the veneer of cool,
hip, stoned detachment that covers everything else like a thick sheet. I am rarely one for sequels, but I would
gladly welcome a spinoff consisting of nothing more than these two characters
playing off each other for two hours straight.

In fact, that seems to be a
recurring theme in P.T.A.’s last three movies, the particulars of story/setting/time
period notwithstanding- the interplay between two people so diametrically
opposed to each other in terms of their personalities, life circumstances, and
goals, that they can’t help being drawn to each other. The results are brutal and violent in the
case of Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday in There
Will Be Blood, a curiously adoring relationship between Freddie Quell and
Lancaster Dodd in The Master, and a
partnership in this movie that is antagonistic on the surface, but also may
mean something more to Doc and Bigfoot than they would ever let on. The similarities and differences between
these different pairs is a topic that, on all its own, could have reams written
about it, and it’s the surest sign in Inherent
Vice that we are indeed seeing a work from Anderson’s strange, strange
mind.

There is an odd, neglected beauty in
how the film drifts, much like the waves that the camera keeps drawing back
to. In, out, in, out, never really
settling in one place. The lighting and
filming style makes it look the film sprang from some decades-old home-movie collection
of an age long gone, much like how the hippy movement had long since receded by
the time the events we see take place. And
even then, the parts of Los Angeles we see, for all their dangers, seem like a
place one could spend an eternity in and pretend that everything is being held
in stasis, never changing, always drifting with the waves.

Perhaps that explains the very nonchalant
way Doc approaches the world. Only
occasionally does something break through.
Something so obviously out of place that he can no longer ignore
it. We get a flashback of a misadventure
he had once with Shasta, where they tried using a Ouija Board to locate a drug
dealer, and find nothing but an empty lot.
Doc happens across the lot during his search for Wolfmann- or maybe for
the not-dead musician, we never really know, if it even matters- except that
now the lot is filled by a massive, gleaming, obtuse, and extremely phallic
office building of some sort. He sees
it, stops, stares briefly, then continues on his way. Wouldn’t do much good to look twice.